Re: [Bitcoin-development] [ANN] High-speed Bitcoin Relay Network
For those who have been using this to get faster relays to/from the network, you may have noticed some instability recently. This is because the nodes were all being upgraded to use some new relaying code which should cut down on duplicate transaction relaying in blocks, improving relay speed within the network and to nodes which run new clients which use the same relaying technique. Essentially instead of relaying entire blocks, nodes keep a rolling window of recently-seen transactions and skip those when relaying blocks. You can find a simple client which connects to a local bitcoind and a relay node at http://bitcoin.ninja/RelayNodeClient.jar and the source for the whole thing at https://github.com/TheBlueMatt/RelayNode. Matt On 11/06/13 05:50, Matt Corallo wrote: Recently, there has been a reasonable amount of discussion about the continued fragility of the public Bitcoin network on IRC and elsewhere (1). To this extent, I'm organizing a system of peering between nodes in the network by creating a system of high-speed relay nodes for miners and merchants/exchanges. This system will a) act as a fallback in the case that the public Bitcoin network encounters issues and b) decrease block propagation times between miners. It is NOT designed to in any way replace or decrease the need for the public Bitcoin P2P network. It is NOT any kind of attempt at centralization, and I still encourage interested parties to establish their own private peering agreements with large miners as needed. Currently the network consists of one specially-designed relay node, but I hope to bring more online in the coming days. This network is open to everyone via a few public relay nodes, but also will have nodes which are made available only to large miners and merchants/exchanges to mitigate the ability of malicious parties to DoS the network. To peer with the public relay nodes, simply select the closest region out of us-west (West Coast US), us-east (East Coast US), eu (Western Europe), au (Australia), or jpy (Japan) and add public.REGION.relay.mattcorallo.com to your addnode list. Note that since all of the relay nodes will relay between each other, you gain no latency advantage by peering with more than the closest node to you (and currently all the regions map to one node, so there they're redundant anyway). For each relay node, you can connect to either port 8334 or 8335. Connecting on port 8334 will relay only blocks, and port 8335 will relay both blocks and transactions. The relay nodes will request any transactions which appear in your invs no matter which port you connect to. Relay node details: * The relay nodes do some data verification to prevent DoS, but in order to keep relay fast, they do not fully verify the data they are relaying, thus YOU SHOULD NEVER mine a block building on top of a relayed block without fully checking it with your own bitcoin validator (as you would any other block relayed from the P2P network). * The relay nodes do not follow the standard inv-getdata-tx/block flow, but instead relay transactions/blocks immediately after they have done their cursory verification. They do keep some track of whether or not your nodes claim to have seen the transactions/blocks before relaying, but you may see transactions/blocks being sent which you already have and have not requested, if this is a problem for you due to bandwith issues, you should reconsider your bandwith constraints and/or are peering with too many nodes. * The relay nodes will all relay among themselves very quickly, so there is no advantage to peering with as many relay nodes as you can find, in fact, the increased incoming bandwidth during block relay spikes may result in higher latency for your nodes. * The relay nodes are NOT designed to ensure that you never miss data, and may fail to relay some transactions. Additionally, because the relay nodes do not respond to standard getdata requests, if you miss a relay and then reconnect, that data will not be sent again by the relay nodes. The relay nodes are NOT a replacement for having peers on the standard P2P network, they are only there to augment the existing P2P network. If you are a merchant/exchange/large miner/other important node operator and wish to gain access to additional domain names which map to relay nodes with fewer peers, please fill out the form at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1UL82QdcXXEhZwSHJAK04Sk_cWg4zLOu8a216nO7Mt8c/viewform You can find the source for the relay nodes at https://github.com/TheBlueMatt/RelayNode If you have any comments/concerns/suggestions, please do not hesitate to email bitcoin-peer...@mattcorallo.com Thanks, Matt (1) There has been extended discussion on #bitcoin-wizards as well as #bitcoin-dev of the very small number of active, listening nodes. Additionally, because many of those nodes are versions prior to 0.8.4, it seems very likely that
Re: [Bitcoin-development] [ANN] High-speed Bitcoin Relay Network
On 11/08/13 06:46, Mike Hearn wrote: I took a brief look at the code - it's looking very reasonable. You can replace any construct like try { Thread.sleep(1000); } catch (InterruptedException e) { throw new RuntimeException(e); } which is quite verbose, just with Uninterruptibles.sleepUninterruptably(1000, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS); (and of course static imports help too) Thanks, fixed. I think for this concept to take off, you'd need a website and to recruit someone to help you market it. Pool operators won't reach out to you. Yes, I've done some initial outreach and plan on doing another major round now that the initial network is up and Im working on running some relay time benchmarks. Finding someone to help push peering would be nice, if you have any suggestions, Im all ears. I still find it perhaps more elegant to just boost the connectivity of the existing network with bitcoind changes, but this can help for now. Agreed, improving relay times across the regular P2P network would be nice, however I really dont see this as a part of the P2P network. Its more of a backup relay network that just happens to follow the P2P protocol (mostly, it doesnt do full block verification, so technically it breaks spec). In this model, this is really a nice augment to the P2P network no matter what improvements are made. Having more protocols/ways blocks are relayed is always nice (anyone wanna launch a satellite?) Matt -- DreamFactory - Open Source REST JSON Services for HTML5 Native Apps OAuth, Users, Roles, SQL, NoSQL, BLOB Storage and External API Access Free app hosting. Or install the open source package on any LAMP server. Sign up and see examples for AngularJS, jQuery, Sencha Touch and Native! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=63469471iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] [ANN] High-speed Bitcoin Relay Network
In the short-term, maybe. Keep in mind that the code for tx relay is fairly different and the bandwidth for transaction relay on these nodes is already lower than it is for blocks (by design). That said, I'd like to look into doing tx-less block relays for transactions that peers already have to limit block relay times even for large blocks, in which case tx relay is very much required. Matt On 11/13/13 15:13, John Dillon wrote: You should split the block-only and block+tx not only by port number, but also by DNS address. DoS attack by flooding blocks is fundamentally more difficult than DoS attack by flooding transctions, so doing the split by IP address ensures that in the event of an attack the more important block relaying functionality is less likely to be damaged. In the meantime point both DNS addresses to the same IP until it becomes an issue. -- DreamFactory - Open Source REST JSON Services for HTML5 Native Apps OAuth, Users, Roles, SQL, NoSQL, BLOB Storage and External API Access Free app hosting. Or install the open source package on any LAMP server. Sign up and see examples for AngularJS, jQuery, Sencha Touch and Native! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=63469471iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] [ANN] High-speed Bitcoin Relay Network
I took a brief look at the code - it's looking very reasonable. You can replace any construct like try { Thread.sleep(1000); } catch (InterruptedException e) { throw new RuntimeException(e); } which is quite verbose, just with Uninterruptibles.sleepUninterruptably(1000, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS); (and of course static imports help too) I think for this concept to take off, you'd need a website and to recruit someone to help you market it. Pool operators won't reach out to you. I still find it perhaps more elegant to just boost the connectivity of the existing network with bitcoind changes, but this can help for now. On Thu, Nov 7, 2013 at 12:35 AM, Matt Corallo bitcoin-l...@bluematt.mewrote: No, the transactions relayed are piped through a bitcoind first (ie fully verified by a bitcoind). For blocks, for which the timing needs to be tighter, bitcoinj does SPV-validation. Though it is possible to create a block which passes SPV validation but causes a DoS score, doing so would cost a miner a full block's worth of profits, which they are fairly unlikely to do. In any case, if it every becomes a problem, its not hard to adapt addnode to allow higher DoS scores for individual nodes. Matt On 11/06/13 07:25, Tier Nolan wrote: On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 5:50 AM, Matt Corallo bitcoin-l...@bluematt.me mailto:bitcoin-l...@bluematt.me wrote: Relay node details: * The relay nodes do some data verification to prevent DoS, but in order to keep relay fast, they do not fully verify the data they are relaying, thus YOU SHOULD NEVER mine a block building on top of a relayed block without fully checking it with your own bitcoin validator (as you would any other block relayed from the P2P network). Wouldn't this cause disconnects due to misbehavior? A standard node connecting to a relay node would receive blocks/transactions that are not valid in some way and then disconnect. Have you looked though the official client to find what things are considered signs that a peer is hostile? I assume things like double spending checks count as misbehavior and can't be quickly checked by a relay node. Maybe another bit could be assigned in the services field as relay. This means that the node doesn't do any checking. Connects to relay nodes could be command line/config file only. Peers wouldn't connect to them. -- November Webinars for C, C++, Fortran Developers Accelerate application performance with scalable programming models. Explore techniques for threading, error checking, porting, and tuning. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60136231iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk ___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development -- November Webinars for C, C++, Fortran Developers Accelerate application performance with scalable programming models. Explore techniques for threading, error checking, porting, and tuning. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60136231iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
Re: [Bitcoin-development] [ANN] High-speed Bitcoin Relay Network
Very cool, thanks Matt. I was actually thinking this morning, maybe we should require all nodes to go through the inv/getdata dance. Otherwise it's possible to improve your chances at racing a block by mining a block, waiting to see a block inv from another node, then blasting out your block while other nodes are still waiting on their getdatas. On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 6:50 AM, Matt Corallo bitcoin-l...@bluematt.mewrote: Recently, there has been a reasonable amount of discussion about the continued fragility of the public Bitcoin network on IRC and elsewhere (1). To this extent, I'm organizing a system of peering between nodes in the network by creating a system of high-speed relay nodes for miners and merchants/exchanges. This system will a) act as a fallback in the case that the public Bitcoin network encounters issues and b) decrease block propagation times between miners. It is NOT designed to in any way replace or decrease the need for the public Bitcoin P2P network. It is NOT any kind of attempt at centralization, and I still encourage interested parties to establish their own private peering agreements with large miners as needed. Currently the network consists of one specially-designed relay node, but I hope to bring more online in the coming days. This network is open to everyone via a few public relay nodes, but also will have nodes which are made available only to large miners and merchants/exchanges to mitigate the ability of malicious parties to DoS the network. To peer with the public relay nodes, simply select the closest region out of us-west (West Coast US), us-east (East Coast US), eu (Western Europe), au (Australia), or jpy (Japan) and add public.REGION.relay.mattcorallo.com to your addnode list. Note that since all of the relay nodes will relay between each other, you gain no latency advantage by peering with more than the closest node to you (and currently all the regions map to one node, so there they're redundant anyway). For each relay node, you can connect to either port 8334 or 8335. Connecting on port 8334 will relay only blocks, and port 8335 will relay both blocks and transactions. The relay nodes will request any transactions which appear in your invs no matter which port you connect to. Relay node details: * The relay nodes do some data verification to prevent DoS, but in order to keep relay fast, they do not fully verify the data they are relaying, thus YOU SHOULD NEVER mine a block building on top of a relayed block without fully checking it with your own bitcoin validator (as you would any other block relayed from the P2P network). * The relay nodes do not follow the standard inv-getdata-tx/block flow, but instead relay transactions/blocks immediately after they have done their cursory verification. They do keep some track of whether or not your nodes claim to have seen the transactions/blocks before relaying, but you may see transactions/blocks being sent which you already have and have not requested, if this is a problem for you due to bandwith issues, you should reconsider your bandwith constraints and/or are peering with too many nodes. * The relay nodes will all relay among themselves very quickly, so there is no advantage to peering with as many relay nodes as you can find, in fact, the increased incoming bandwidth during block relay spikes may result in higher latency for your nodes. * The relay nodes are NOT designed to ensure that you never miss data, and may fail to relay some transactions. Additionally, because the relay nodes do not respond to standard getdata requests, if you miss a relay and then reconnect, that data will not be sent again by the relay nodes. The relay nodes are NOT a replacement for having peers on the standard P2P network, they are only there to augment the existing P2P network. If you are a merchant/exchange/large miner/other important node operator and wish to gain access to additional domain names which map to relay nodes with fewer peers, please fill out the form at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1UL82QdcXXEhZwSHJAK04Sk_cWg4zLOu8a216nO7Mt8c/viewform You can find the source for the relay nodes at https://github.com/TheBlueMatt/RelayNode If you have any comments/concerns/suggestions, please do not hesitate to email bitcoin-peer...@mattcorallo.com Thanks, Matt (1) There has been extended discussion on #bitcoin-wizards as well as #bitcoin-dev of the very small number of active, listening nodes. Additionally, because many of those nodes are versions prior to 0.8.4, it seems very likely that maliciously creating network splits or at least drastically reducing the number of peers for most nodes would not be particularly challenging in the current network. Also, http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/49318d3f56c1d525aabf7fda78b23fc0/P2P2013_041.pdf noted that they were able to single-handledly decrease the network-wide orphan rate by around 50% by improving
Re: [Bitcoin-development] [ANN] High-speed Bitcoin Relay Network
On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 5:50 AM, Matt Corallo bitcoin-l...@bluematt.mewrote: Relay node details: * The relay nodes do some data verification to prevent DoS, but in order to keep relay fast, they do not fully verify the data they are relaying, thus YOU SHOULD NEVER mine a block building on top of a relayed block without fully checking it with your own bitcoin validator (as you would any other block relayed from the P2P network). Wouldn't this cause disconnects due to misbehavior? A standard node connecting to a relay node would receive blocks/transactions that are not valid in some way and then disconnect. Have you looked though the official client to find what things are considered signs that a peer is hostile? I assume things like double spending checks count as misbehavior and can't be quickly checked by a relay node. Maybe another bit could be assigned in the services field as relay. This means that the node doesn't do any checking. Connects to relay nodes could be command line/config file only. Peers wouldn't connect to them. -- November Webinars for C, C++, Fortran Developers Accelerate application performance with scalable programming models. Explore techniques for threading, error checking, porting, and tuning. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60136231iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk___ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
[Bitcoin-development] [ANN] High-speed Bitcoin Relay Network
Recently, there has been a reasonable amount of discussion about the continued fragility of the public Bitcoin network on IRC and elsewhere (1). To this extent, I'm organizing a system of peering between nodes in the network by creating a system of high-speed relay nodes for miners and merchants/exchanges. This system will a) act as a fallback in the case that the public Bitcoin network encounters issues and b) decrease block propagation times between miners. It is NOT designed to in any way replace or decrease the need for the public Bitcoin P2P network. It is NOT any kind of attempt at centralization, and I still encourage interested parties to establish their own private peering agreements with large miners as needed. Currently the network consists of one specially-designed relay node, but I hope to bring more online in the coming days. This network is open to everyone via a few public relay nodes, but also will have nodes which are made available only to large miners and merchants/exchanges to mitigate the ability of malicious parties to DoS the network. To peer with the public relay nodes, simply select the closest region out of us-west (West Coast US), us-east (East Coast US), eu (Western Europe), au (Australia), or jpy (Japan) and add public.REGION.relay.mattcorallo.com to your addnode list. Note that since all of the relay nodes will relay between each other, you gain no latency advantage by peering with more than the closest node to you (and currently all the regions map to one node, so there they're redundant anyway). For each relay node, you can connect to either port 8334 or 8335. Connecting on port 8334 will relay only blocks, and port 8335 will relay both blocks and transactions. The relay nodes will request any transactions which appear in your invs no matter which port you connect to. Relay node details: * The relay nodes do some data verification to prevent DoS, but in order to keep relay fast, they do not fully verify the data they are relaying, thus YOU SHOULD NEVER mine a block building on top of a relayed block without fully checking it with your own bitcoin validator (as you would any other block relayed from the P2P network). * The relay nodes do not follow the standard inv-getdata-tx/block flow, but instead relay transactions/blocks immediately after they have done their cursory verification. They do keep some track of whether or not your nodes claim to have seen the transactions/blocks before relaying, but you may see transactions/blocks being sent which you already have and have not requested, if this is a problem for you due to bandwith issues, you should reconsider your bandwith constraints and/or are peering with too many nodes. * The relay nodes will all relay among themselves very quickly, so there is no advantage to peering with as many relay nodes as you can find, in fact, the increased incoming bandwidth during block relay spikes may result in higher latency for your nodes. * The relay nodes are NOT designed to ensure that you never miss data, and may fail to relay some transactions. Additionally, because the relay nodes do not respond to standard getdata requests, if you miss a relay and then reconnect, that data will not be sent again by the relay nodes. The relay nodes are NOT a replacement for having peers on the standard P2P network, they are only there to augment the existing P2P network. If you are a merchant/exchange/large miner/other important node operator and wish to gain access to additional domain names which map to relay nodes with fewer peers, please fill out the form at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1UL82QdcXXEhZwSHJAK04Sk_cWg4zLOu8a216nO7Mt8c/viewform You can find the source for the relay nodes at https://github.com/TheBlueMatt/RelayNode If you have any comments/concerns/suggestions, please do not hesitate to email bitcoin-peer...@mattcorallo.com Thanks, Matt (1) There has been extended discussion on #bitcoin-wizards as well as #bitcoin-dev of the very small number of active, listening nodes. Additionally, because many of those nodes are versions prior to 0.8.4, it seems very likely that maliciously creating network splits or at least drastically reducing the number of peers for most nodes would not be particularly challenging in the current network. Also, http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/49318d3f56c1d525aabf7fda78b23fc0/P2P2013_041.pdf noted that they were able to single-handledly decrease the network-wide orphan rate by around 50% by improving network peering. Finally, you've all seen the recent discussion on malicious mining algorithms. Though those are not entirely prevented by reducing block propagation times, they can be significantly limited compared to the current, rather disjoint, network. -- November Webinars for C, C++, Fortran Developers Accelerate application performance with scalable programming models. Explore techniques for threading, error